Not twittering yet? Wow, you are so yesterday, last week, a part of the LiveJournal or Yahoo! crowd. C’mon, get with the program and start laying out your interesting, exciting life, one 140-character chunk at a time!
After all, Shakespeare didn’t limit himself to just …
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This is good. I was reading this hoping that it was all tongue-in-cheek, but couldn’t tell as you nicely parodied the Twitter enthusiast. If people enjoy using Twitter, that’s fine. For me, I don’t quite get it. At my Web site, Twitter Backlash, I’ve commented on the morality and other aspects of Twitter that I believe need to be looked at as more people use it.
http://www.twitterbacklash.com
I’m late to the party with this whole Twitter thing, too. I’ve only had an account for a little over three weeks and already I’ve found it to be frustrating for three main reasons:
1. To me, it reinforces the notion that there’s nothing of worth to add to the public conversation. Because whatever message you want to tweet, someone else has already tweeted (!?) it. Twenty-five other people ate Cheerios for breakfast too, fifty other people already mentioned that news story you thought was breaking, & hundreds have already made that clever observation about everyone wants masks for swine flu but no one will wear a condom to protect themselves from AIDS. Yeah, everything’s been said and done. Bummer.
2. Twitter alone is a microcosm of the Internet in general. Like the Web at large, there’s information from both reliable and unreliable sources. And on Twitter, it’s remarkably easy to find both good & bad information. It won’t be long before school-aged kids begin citing tweets in their research papers. (Are the MLA & APA working on a citation style yet?)
3. My third gripe is all about information overload. I promised myself that I’d reduce my time spent on the Internet so that I could have more time to relax, exercise, de-stress, & goof off with other unstructured activities. There’s something about Twitter that’s compelling (probably the real-time nature of it all) & sticky. I made the mistake of typing in “Swine Flu” yesterday to see if I could pick up on the latest news story, & I got way more information than I bargained for. Instead of spending five minutes reading a single news story, I spent about two hours opening multiple tabs to multiple news stories thanks to multiple tweets that all sounded worthy of investigating. I was stuck in an information trap…on a nice 70 degree day when I could have been goofing around outside. Ugh.
My sentiments exactly after reading the above comment from Adam and reading his site’s comments about the lack of effort and sentiment in this technology. Besides, how devoid of existence are these people who focus on this communication style?
And, at risk to raise the ire of Dr Grohol, does it reinforce addiction-type behavior of those using the technology of the internet? Or, is this post tongue in cheek and I missed that sentiment?
OK, reading it again, I guess I missed the tongue in cheek comment at the end, so my mistake. But, why give it validation by mentioning it in somewhat of a positive vein in the first place?
Actually this a pretty good list john and infact twitter core team too won’t be able to come up with something new to add in the list.
I think you are not an average twitter user
Abhimanyu
http://mwolk.com/blog
I read the first one, and then I stopped reading. I mean, come on, you really HAD to go for the socialist argument to ridicule Twitter? You nearly called it communist, well done… This reminds me of the Godwin law, but for communism…
Mind you, this could have been an interesting discussion, even a little tongue-in-cheek, but no…
We’re all equal in the twitterverse, so a comparison to socialism — where all people are supposedly on equal footing ideally — is not unwarranted.
I wasn’t going for the in-depth, serious discussion in this article, sorry!
I see some benefits of Twitter such as the speed at which one can connect to others and spread important news that sometimes needs to be spread quickly, such as an Amber Alert; however, this is exactly what’s wrong with it.
We, PEOPLE, are social beings–we require intimacy, touch, friendship and bonding but I feel technology has pushed us too far into the wrong kind of social connection. We are always “plugged in”. (When is the last time your cell phone was off for 24hrs straight? When have you forgotten your phone and not turned back home to go get it?)
More than ever, people are sending texts, e-mails, tweets (or whatever) to others as means of communication rather than actually calling them or visiting in person. It is even acceptable to not visit someone on a holiday as long as you send them a pretty, well-written e-card.
Also, this constant connection is expected. I’ll share a few personal examples…
1: It’s my friend’s birthday, we hang out, I give her a gift, we celebrate, but she complains how I didn’t text her Happy Birthday earlier that morning.
Example 2: It’s New Year’s Eve, the countdown has just reached zero so it is now a new year…my friend is texting everyone to say Happy New Year faster than I could even take a sip of cider. She gets upset when a person or two she texted didn’t write back, not understanding that they may we with family, asleep, or simply satisfied with reading the messege and don’t feel the need to respond.
Example 3: While having a conversation with my friend (in person) she is texting nonstop, having conversations with multiple other people. This is BEYOND rude, but seems to now be socailly acceptable.
Example 4: While driving my friend hears a beep from her phone and “has to” respond to the text or at leat pick up the phone and look to see what the sender had to say simply because they wrote to her.
Example 5: I get made fun of for not checking my MySpace account often enough and people actually get offended that I don’t log-in to check if they’ve sent my anything.
The list can go on and on, but my point is simply this: We are too connected by gadgets and technology and we’re slowly forgetting what it is to be human. We smile through a keyboard
and no longer our mouthes. We completely change languange, not for the better with text/IM/e-mail jargon such as LOL, ROLF, L8R, SK8R, OMFG, and plenty more I have yet to learn. Do the benefits of such connection outweigh what is happening to our culture–our vulnerable youth?
I leave you with a very appropriate yet saddening quote by Albert Einstein: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
I couldn’t agree more, Albert, I couldn’t agree more.
After you find out how high is up,what’s beyond that?